eSefarad Noticias del Mundo Sefaradi
By Mariangela Chatzistamatiou
Book accompanied by a QR-code to listen to the songs
Alexandria Publications, 2024
The publication Holocaust Songs of the Greek Jews presents for the first time, in one volume and recorded, 16 songs written by Greek Jews during the Holocaust. This is a research project of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, under the auspices of the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and co-financed by the European Jewish Fund, the Claims Conference and the department of History and Archeology of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
The songs described in this book are mainly arrangements of European folk songs, songs from film music or opera, Greek folk songs or Rebetika[1]. During the Holocaust, Greek Jews adapted these songs with new lyrics that spoke of their hopes or fears, their love for their homeland, Greece, and/or their hometown, Thessalonica. In this way, these songs often become a source of historical information about the Holocaust. They fall into three main categories: those written in the Baron Hirsch ghetto in Thessalonica, those written inside the Auschwitz camps and, finally, those written by survivors after the Holocaust.
Soprano Mariangela Chatzistamatiou is the driving force behind this project. After a concert in the Jewish community of Volos (Greece) in December 2016, she became interested in the songs of the Jewish tradition and began researching the topic. As the majority of Greek Jews were exterminated during the Shoah[2], she became interested in Holocaust songs written or preserved in memory by the few survivors of this massacre. The result is a corpus of 16 songs presented in this collection, written in Greek and English.
The first part of the book sets the context for Mariangela Chatzistamatiou’s research, with introductory texts by such eminent figures as Maria Farantouri, Léon Nar, Betty Magrizou, Professor Giorgos Antoniou and David Saltiel, President of the Central Council of Jewish Communities in Greece.
The second part of the collection, divided into three sections (Songs of the Ghetto, Songs of the Camps, and After the Holocaust), gives the lyrics of these 16 songs, their source and the context in which they were performed.
At the end of the booklet is a QR code that allows you to listen to the songs on the YouTube page of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki. The songs are performed by Mariangela Chatistamatiou and the musical ensemble Pellegrinaggio al levante, under the direction of Nikos Panagiotides, in collaboration with students and teachers from the Volos School of Music.
The book is available from Alexandria Publications and is also available at the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki and in all bookstores.
